Dallas-Fort Worth residents made more money in 2016 than the year before, while the region’s poverty rate declined, new numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show.

The D-FW metro area’s median household income jumped by 2.7 percent in 2016, from $62,135 in 2015 to $63,812, according to the Census’ American Community Survey. The percentage of people in poverty dipped from 13.4 percent to 12.7 percent.

That was a picture repeated -- though to a lesser degree -- at the state level. Nationally, too, incomes rose and poverty declined.

Experts said the latest data may be an indication that the wealth pouring into North Texas is finally filtering into struggling communities. However, they cautioned that in a fast-growing state’s fastest-growing metropolis, such encouraging statistics could mask a more complicated reality.

“These small increases in income and decreases in poverty may not be capturing the full blend,” said Pia Orrenius, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “These fast-growing areas didn’t see any slowdown in rent and house prices -- we’ve seen that accelerated.”

And Hurricane Harvey’s impacts could make the future more complex still -- and not just for southeast Texas.

Suburban growth

As North Texas continues to attract corporate jobs and new residents to fill those jobs by the thousands, it came as no surprise, experts said, that the region’s median income grew last year.

“D-FW has been the fastest-growing large metro area in the nation for many years,” said Bernard Weinstein, associate director of SMU’s Maguire Energy Institute. “We’ve been outpacing everyone.”

But that growth has largely concentrated in suburban counties.

All of the top five Texas counties by median income last year were suburbs of the state’s largest metro areas, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis -- and, State Demographer Lloyd Potter said, most were also among the “areas having the most dramatic demographic change.”

Case in point: Comal County, outside San Antonio, had the state’s second-biggest median income jump last year by percentage and it was also among the nation’s fastest-growing counties.

Disparities

By contrast, population growth in the state’s biggest urban counties, including Harris and Dallas, has been fueled largely by immigration. Demographic statistics show immigrants also tend to be younger and to have more children.

Those counties are also the ones with the highest numbers of people living in poverty. Texas counties with the highest concentrations of poverty tended to be heavily Latino.

In part as a result, advocates noted, poverty rates in the state were much higher among Hispanic and black children, despite slightly narrowing gaps.

In 2015, the poverty rate among Hispanic children was 22 percentage points higher than among white children. Among black children, that number was 21 percentage points higher, Kristie Tingle, a research analyst with the left-leaning Austin think tank the Center for Public Policy Priorities, found.

In the latest data, 31 percent of Hispanic children in Texas lived in poverty and 29 percent of black children lived in poverty, while the poverty rate for white children was 10 percent.

But Census data show that minority populations -- Hispanics, in particular -- are growing. And they tend to be younger, which means that threats to their ability to learn are threats to the state’s workforce.

On the other hand, natural disasters often wipe out wealth that families built up by owning homes, because few people are able to fully insure their property and government relief often comes in the form of loans.

“You’re not made completely whole,” Orrenius said.

Potter, the state demographer, said that if lower-income people who fled the Houston area ahead of Harvey don’t come back, that could change the makeup of all of the state’s major metro areas.

“After [Hurricane] Katrina, poor people who were displaced were less likely to go back,” he said.

Ultimately, though, he said it’s impossible to know.

“We tend to want to equate those things because we have the experience with Katrina, but things could be quite different,” he said.